Shang Wei | Columbia University
In the New Culture Movement more than a hundred years ago, Hu Shi, a representative scholar who advocated vernacular literature, advocated that China should also replace the "dead script" (wenyan) with a "living script" (vernacular languages) instead of Latin in the early modern Europe. This article argues that although such associations or reasoning have long since become common sense axioms, as if they were natural, they actually do not stand up to scrutiny. Because it ignores the basic difference between the so-called "vernacular" in the context of Chinese history and the vernacular of modern Europe, ignores the distinction between writing and language (especially the distinction between meaningful Chinese character writing and language), and also ignores the difference between Chinese characters and pinyin characters, resulting in a series of confusions. More importantly, it confused the narrative logic of empires and nation-states, which we can clearly distinguish today, thus creating a considerable historical misunderstanding. But this is yet another meaningful misunderstanding, from which we can glimpse the specific path of China's history and national transformation, and the powerful logic behind it.
This article was originally divided into two parts, the first and second parts, published in Reading, No. 11 and 12, 2016, originally titled "Separation of Language and Literature and the Historical Misunderstanding of the Modern Nation-State - "Vernacular Literature" and Its Significance". The article only represents the author's point of view and is for the consideration of the monarch.
The separation of language and the historical misunderstanding of the modern nation-state, the "vernacular language", and its significance
In his letter to Chen Duxiu in 1916, Hu Shi first published the "Eight No's Doctrine" of the "Literary Revolution", which also opened the prelude to Hu Shi's vernacular literary movement. Since then, the story has been full of wind and water, the waves are magnificent, everyone is very familiar, and the impact is still endless. It can even be said that we still live in the shadow of the vernacular movement. A century is not short, and the dust has settled. So, how should we review and evaluate this period of history today? What is the problem and significance of the vernacular movement?
Hu Shi advocated the vernacular literature movement, and traced the production of vernacular literature back to the Han Dynasty, writing a "History of Vernacular Literature". According to himself, "vernacular literature" is vernacular literature. Hu Shi used this concept many times throughout his life, and this is still true in his english autobiography in his later years.
Hu Shi's discussion of vernacular literature is based on the historical experience of modern Europe. In China's transition from the Qing Empire to a nation-state, he advocated replacing the "dead script" with a "living script"—the latter being the dominant script and the former being the so-called "vernacular script," as in early modern Europe had replaced Latin. In his view, it is not enough to rely solely on the vernacular of history, but on this basis, we must keep pace with the times and develop Chinese literature and literary Chinese.
Such associations or reasoning have long since become common sense axioms, as if they were taken for granted, but in fact they do not stand up to scrutiny. Because it ignores the basic difference between the so-called "vernacular" in the context of Chinese history and the vernacular of modern Europe, ignores the distinction between writing and language (especially the distinction between the meaning of Chinese characters and languages), and also ignores the difference between Chinese characters and pinyin characters, that is, the relationship between them and the spoken language, which causes a series of confusions. More importantly, it confused the narrative logic of empires and nation-states, which we can clearly distinguish today, thus creating a considerable historical misunderstanding. But this is yet another meaningful misunderstanding, in which a glimpse of China's particular path from empire to nation-state, and the powerful logic behind it.
▍ What is "vernacular"?
In his Imagined Community, Benedict Anderson argues that there are fundamental differences between European empires and nation-states in terms of their internal constitutive logic and their legitimacy. It is precisely because of the convergence of factors such as capitalism, printing technology and the diversity of human languages that a new type of imaginary community has been created, setting the stage for the emergence of the modern nation-state. In the course of this history, local colloquialism and local writing were irreversibly linked to the collapse of empires and the rise of the nation-state.
Latin, as a sacred script, has its corresponding colloquial language, latin, which is authoritative and universal across regions. However, by the late Middle Ages, many parts of Europe gradually adopted local phonetics to read Latin, and the same Latin was often pronounced according to their respective spoken languages, and could not communicate effectively. For pinyin characters, this is a deviation from convention (although strictly speaking, pinyin characters may not always be consistent. For example, some words in English are spelled inconsistently and pronounced). But the rise of the local spoken language became, after all, a force to be reckoned with, and began to enter the writing, making the necessary preparations for the formation of the modern European nation-state. Of course, this period of history is long, many factors are involved, and the situation is different in various parts of Europe. Some scholars have proposed amendments to Anderson's relevant statements. For example, in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, the Latin Bible was translated into local languages, dating back at least to the second century AD, and was recognized by the Church. Medieval Europe was not Latin. But in any case, the replacement of Latin by local scripts remained an important factor in the eventual division of European empires.
Psalter, Germany, ca.1250 / Ohio State University Library in Latin
Hu Shi intended to compare the authentic Literary Script (or Ancient Script) to the Latin Script, as he understood the European model, declaring that they were far from the spoken language and were dead. In its place, in Hu Shi's view, is the vernacular counterpart of the European vernacular. That is, he gave the vernacular the basic characteristics of writing in the local spoken language of Europe. What's more, he almost wrote a history of Chinese literature into a "two-line" struggle between literary and vernacular: vernacular literature representing the lower classes of commoners was constantly suppressed and rejected by orthodox literary and linguistic texts, but eventually won over literati authors and readers, and became the mainstream of literary history.
Equating the vernacular with the local languages and scripts of Europe is not from the beginning of Hu Shi, and the academic community has recognized that Qiu Tingliang played an irreplaceable role. In August 1898, he published "On the Vernacular as the Basis of the Restoration" in the wuxi vernacular newspaper, which was founded not long ago, and for the first time proposed "revering the vernacular and abolishing the literary language", and cited the European precedent to point out that during the Renaissance, all parts of the Renaissance were written in "vernacular", and the people's wisdom was greatly enlightened. In fact, long before Qiu Tingliang, missionaries from Europe used the concept of vernacular to describe the Chinese language, but referred to the spoken dialects of the localities they spelled in the Roman alphabet. Even, Ma Jianzhong, in ma's Wentong, also translated vernacular into "dialect".
Vernacular newspapers appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Indeed, in the context of European history, vernacular refers to the local colloquialism, which is closer to our dialect colloquialism, which, after spelling, gradually formed the script of the later European countries. But Hu Shi did not hesitate to equate the vernacular with the local script of Europe: vernacular literature came from the folk spoken language, which contrasted with temple literature; and the oral basis of vernacular literature, once a popular "general language", became an official language in the Ming and Qing dynasties. But even if Hu Shi's thinking is accepted, this analogy is difficult to establish. First of all, as a local spoken language, The Vernacular in Europe is very different from the official language of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The official dialect is derived from the northern dialect, but is the product of a general synthesis, so it can cross regions and is the so-called "lingua franca" or "lingua franca". Its users included merchants, monks and officials who traveled between different regions, rather than ordinary people. Secondly, vernacular is the "mother tongue" of the locals, unlearned; it comes from the lower classes and can be translated into colloquial slang, so it is also different from our official language. Mandarin is acquired, and no one is born to speak it; mandarin has the status of being officially recognized and performs formal administrative functions in some official documents (such as when disposing of litigation confessions). Therefore, the official language is by no means the language of "civilians". And if it really forms the linguistic basis of the vernacular as Hu Shi said, how can vernacular literature become the literature of the common people? And why should we compete with the temple literature?
The speakers of the dialect certainly included readers, officials and squires, not just the common people. These identity dialect users often practice the official dialect at the same time and use it in formal occasions. In the eyes of some missionaries in the Qing Dynasty, the dialect was naturally vernacular, but the official dialect was in a position similar to Latin, because it had a trans-regional universality and officially recognized orthodoxy. For the same reason, some missionaries simply refer to Chinese character writing as Chinese Latin. And what about the Chinese vernacular writing form? That's still up to them to spell it out of the dialect. It is not without ambiguity to look at the chinese character writing on an equal footing with Latin, but at least it shows how outrageous it is to think of the vernacular as a form of writing in China.
The reality is this: in the days of the Roman Empire, there was only one written script that really had an authoritative position and cross-regional versatility, and that was Latin (although Greek had been seen several times), and the corresponding spoken language was Latin. In addition, there are many local languages, which gradually entered the writing system before and after the decline of the empire. The situation in the Chinese Empire was different, and there were at least two types of common types of writing that were officially recognized by the empire, namely, Wen yan and vernacular in the words of Qiu Tingliang and Hu Shi (the Yuan Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty were slightly different, for example, the official script of the Qing Dynasty also included Manchu and Mongolian, but the scope of use was limited. When even the Manchus themselves could not read manchus, only symbolic meaning remained.) This did not correspond to the situation in the Roman Empire, so missionaries compared the writing of Chinese characters to Latin. Vernacular is closer to the style of spoken language than mandarin, but is still a written language that is still quite far from the actual spoken language, not only in terms of vocabulary, but also in syntax and word order. But because of this, vernacular is as universal as literary language: readers in different dialect areas, whether they speak mandarin or not, can read and understand. That is to say, the vernacular and the literary language together played the role of the "sacred silent language" (Anderson) that maintained the ancient vast empire. This is contrasted with the colloquial language, especially the various dialects. Although the writing system of Chinese characters can absorb some of their elements, it cannot be fully reproduced like Pinyin characters.
Whatever the motives and purposes, the May Fourth vernacular movement finally caused a historical misunderstanding. As a result, no form of writing was created that originated from local colloquialisms like Vernacular in Europe. The "May Fourth" literati did say so, and the flag was lit up, but it was a different thing to do. Even Hu Shi himself admitted that the so-called "vernacular script" had long existed, not their twentieth-century invention. This is completely incomparable with the role played by Dante and Boccaccio in the formation of the Italian language.
▍ Spoken and written language: the principle of separation of words and texts
We can also question the correspondence between Hu Shi's vernal vernacular and vernacular from another perspective. One fundamental difference between Chinese character writing and vernacular as a pinyin character is that it does not constitute a spelling or reproduction of any one spoken form. Due to the wide variety of speech systems within the empire, in the history of Chinese character writing, at least until modern times, there has never really been a "consistency of words and texts". From the standpoint of writing, "having a sound without words" is a common situation. From the perspective of recitation, because each word can be pronounced differently in different dialects, there is no one-to-one correspondence between words and sounds. This phenomenon, which I call "structural separation of words and words", is the structural separation between written words and spoken language. Therefore, in terms of writing or recitation, there is no vernacular in the Chinese character writing system. Defining the vernacular as a form of writing in spoken language does not hold true from the outset.
Some people may say: Although Chinese characters are not pinyin characters, they contain the components of pronunciation, as well as anti-cutting and other phonetic methods, so they also have inherent prescriptiveness to pronunciation. In addition, in ancient times, there were "Yayan dialects", and there were official dialects since the Ming and Qing dynasties, plus the common reading sound, did not they all play a role in unifying the pronunciation and consistency of speech and text?
First of all, the normative effect on the spoken language in the morphophone is only relative, and the same sound side can have different pronunciations in different dialects. Even in the second half of the twentieth century, a relatively fixed relationship between words and sounds in Chinese character writing was roughly formed, but this relationship was more built and maintained by external forces and habits, rather than from the inherent attributes and prescriptiveness of the language itself. This was not possible during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and the standard rhyme books of that time had little impact on the actual spoken language. However, the regional differences within the empire are undeniable facts, and these regional differences are difficult to fully reflect in the writing system of Chinese characters. The Qing novel "The Tale of the Flowers on the Sea" imitates the Wu language in the character dialogue, but basically uses the Chinese characters as sound marks, ignoring their meaning, and has actually deviated from the writing system of Chinese characters. If the reader does not understand the Wu language, he will not know what he is doing. This situation is also found in Cantonese literature.
As for the Ming and Qing dynasties, the homogeneity of its speech system and the stability of the cross-time cannot be overestimated. The official dialects within each large dialect area are the result of a compromise mixed with the local dialect. Therefore, as a bureaucratic language, there are also considerable differences between different regions, and it is difficult to ensure the smooth flow of oral communication, especially in the south. The dialect differences in the northern region are relatively small, but the extent of Chinese character writing to absorb the spoken language is limited, and many works known for local characteristics are usually just a combination of various means to create local flavors, or symbolically inlaid with some iconic words. Even Lao She, who is known for his Beijing colloquialisms, has complained that many of the colloquial phrases he is familiar with cannot be written into words. Although it is a practice to create words or borrow words, such as "旮旯", it is quite limited and cannot be done as you please.
Early Beijing dialect literature published in the 1920s, "Comparison Table of National Sounds and Jingyin"
The phenomenon of reading sounds is so complex that it is impossible to discuss them here. Some scholars believe that the pronunciation of reading is close to the official dialect, but it is not generalized. Zhao Yuanren recalls in "From Hometown to the United States - Memories of Zhao Yuanren's Early Years", recalling that when he was a child, he studied in his hometown and used the Changzhou dialect: "When I was five years old, I spoke a kind of pure Beijing dialect, and spoke an authentic Jiangsu Changshu dialect, but when I read, I would only use the Jiangsu Changzhou pronunciation. What needs to be added is that the so-called "Changzhou pronunciation" is not "township talk", but "gentleman talk", which is the dialect used by readers such as the squire. There is a difference between gentleman talk and folk talk in pronunciation, and the range of vocabulary does not necessarily correspond to overlap. Linguists have done some case studies that are worth referring to.
For the national mobilization of emerging nation-states and the top-down enlightenment, the separation of words and texts created many obstacles, but it was precisely because they were not tied to a fixed phonetic system that the writing of Chinese characters was widely spread over a long period of history, across different language regions, and even as far as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. This situation is similar to that of Semitic languages, in that the same written text can be pronounced in different places: Arabic and Hebrew are spelled without vowels, allowing the reader to recite it according to the phonetics of their respective regions. This is an exception in pinyin text. But for the writing of Chinese characters with ideographs, the structural separation of characters from spoken language happens to be a core feature. Since it has nothing to do with pronunciation, but only in terms of text, the so-called vernacular and wenyan are just two interdependent and interpenetrating types in the same Chinese character writing system. They are closely related to stylistic traditions, but they are not directly related to spoken language, and it is impossible to distinguish or make a judgment based on whether they correspond to spoken language.
Understanding this, it is not difficult to understand why before the second half of the nineteenth century, there was no antithetical version of vernacular and vernacular texts in Mainland China: no one regarded them as two different writing systems, let alone, as the May Fourth scholars did, they believed that there was no you between them, and you died and I lived and died. Even the vernacular and literary statements themselves are latecomers. At that time, there was indeed the word "vernacular", but it referred to idle chatter, politeness, and unobtrusive rumors, etc., which was not comparable to the definition given by the "May Fourth" scholars in the late Qing Dynasty. As for the word "wen yan", it was even more rare at that time. The popular saying is "wenli", which is roughly close to the meaning of "wenyan wen", but it is usually divided into "deep literary science" and "shallow literary science". The distinction between wenbai and white in the May Fourth period, in the previous vision, basically belonged to the category of style and style, such as Piao wen, Shiwen, ancient literature and novel opera, or see the difference between elegant and vulgar texts. The ancient writers of the Tang and Song dynasties inevitably had to define the ancient text by contrasting it with the Piao script. They could never have imagined that Xiaowen would be placed in a common category called "Wenyanwen" or "Guwen" along with Guwen. In fact, the so-called vernacular opera novels, most of which are well-written, mix some components of ancient Chinese idioms, poetic lyrics, vernacular narrative styles, and even oral expressions in the same work, and it is impossible to measure and divide the dichotomy of literary and vernacular, not to mention that the vernacular language retains traces derived from the literary language in terms of syntax and vocabulary (including the two-syllable vocabulary that is different from the literary language). There are not many works that can be classified as "vernacular text", and well-known examples, such as Feng Menglong's "Mountain Song", "Hanging Branches" and other similar lyrics, have incorporated a lot of dialect components, and readers familiar with the vernacular may not even be able to understand it.
But it is here that we see not only the problems of the May Fourth vernacular movement, but also its significance, and the importance of the principle of separation of words and texts: the concept of "vernacular" that has emerged recently has been enriched and expanded to become the only legitimate type of Chinese character writing. Correspondingly, the vernacular, which developed from within the imperial writing tradition, now joins the historical process of constructing the modern nation-state in the name of Chinese. This means that the vernacular form of writing has become the link that holds the emerging nation-state together and the medium that ensures cross-regional communication within it.
The Ili Vernacular Newspaper was founded in March 1910 and discontinued in December 1911
Modern Europe constructs the script in local dialects, thus forming numerous communities of nation-states. The Vernacular or Chinese Literature of the May Fourth Period was the opposite: it still continued the tradition of the imperial writing center and the separation of speech and language, and constructed the nation-state through unified writing, the only difference being that from the coexistence of wen and vernacular to the monopoly of vernacular. Like Wen yanwen, the vernacular script is also a written language with a long tradition, and if you count from the Tang Dynasty's variations, it has a history of at least a thousand years. Of course, compared with the vernacular, the vernacular is close to the style of the spoken language, and can also accommodate some elements of the spoken language, so it is easier to communicate, but it does not constitute a direct presentation of the spoken language: although the spoken language of the reader is very different, they can not communicate with each other, but they can read and understand the vernacular. Because of this, China, as a new nation-state, was able to maintain the integrity of its vast empire after abandoning the language and language, and did not split into a large number of nation-states because of differences in local spoken and phonetic languages. This is a watershed between the Chinese experience and the European experience.
After all, the modern nation-state is not a copy of a traditional empire, and it must at least meet the universal needs that accompany modernization, including uniform pronunciation and speech consistency. But China in the early twentieth century was still different, and in its process of unifying phonetic and verbal consistency, the relationship between writing and speaking was strangely reversed: first the standard Chinese writing form was created based on the vernacular, and through the top-down state behavior (including the establishment of the Roman pinyin alphabet and the Chinese pedagogy), the standard Chinese and the national pronunciation were changed into the popular spoken language, and then the "I handwrite my mouth" was learned, and the spoken language was written into words. In fact, such a Chinese itself has already passed the baptism of standardization of writing. For a long time, our linguists made it their mission to standardize Chinese character writing and to reshape the spoken language in this way. One of their missions is to "purify the language of the motherland."
▍ Hu Shi's experience: familiar with "Water Margin" and learn to write vernacular texts
What is surprising is that the best proof of the above discussion is Hu Shi's own experience and related statements. When Hu Shi expressed his concept of "vernacular literature", he often fell into contradictions, but these contradictions were quite illustrative. For example, when he contrasts the vernacular with the vernacular, he compares the vernacular with the vernacular, and he says that the vernacular literature is the real "vernacular literature", which is a living script. For example, Xu Zhimo once spelled Wu in Chinese characters in several poems, and Hu Shi admired this. The trouble with this statement is obvious: if writers, like Xu Zhimo, had embedded Chinese characters in their poems as sound marks, the vernacular literature or Chinese literature advocated by Hu Shi would have been abandoned long ago. However, once he thought that dialect literature was vernacular literature, he could not help but criticize the exemplary work of "vernacular literature" he admired, "Ru Lin Wai Shi": "Literature should be able to express differences in personality; begging women and women all say that Sima Qian and Ban Gu's ancient Wengu are ridiculous, and Zhang San and Li Si all say that the vernacular in "Dream of the Red Chamber" and "Ru Lin Wai Shi" is also very ridiculous. The opening part of the "History of Ru Linwai" is written from Zhejiang to Shandong and Guangdong, but it does not consider the local dialect and colloquialisms at all, no wonder Hu Shi has this saying, excluding the "vernacular" in the novel from the spoken language spoken by Zhang San and Li Si. As for contemporary vernacular literature, Hu Shi also has something to say: "So I often think that if Mr. Lu Xun's "A Q Zheng biography" was made in Shaoxing dialect, how much vitality would be added to that novel! "If Hu Shi didn't understand vernacular's original intentions, it really wasn't." In his study abroad diaries and in many later articles, he used the Latin word vulgate, saying that Dante entered literature as a "colloquialism". He also cites English literature as an example, "There are at least a hundred dialects in his three islands. There are several important dialects, such as Scottish, Irish, and Wells, all of which have noble literature" ("Answer to the Monks of Huang Jue", for a similar term, see "The Theory of the Literary Revolution of Construction"). Just when he returned to the Chinese context, he did not hesitate to confuse the dialect colloquialisms with the vernacular, on the one hand, erasing the boundaries between dialects and official dialects, on the other hand, ignoring the difference between Chinese characters and pinyin characters, and equating writing with spoken language. He even claimed: "To be honest, Chinese is no more than the most dominant dialect; today's Chinese literature was nothing more than dialect literature many years ago." Although the official dialect of the Ming and Qing dynasties roughly originated from the northern dialect, it is obviously impossible to customize the official dialect as a dialect. And between the vernacular and the official language, how can we draw an equal sign, and everything will be fine?
In a lecture entitled "The Causes of Advocating Vernacular Literature," Hu Shi also led by example, imparting the experience of learning vernacular writing. He came from a non-official dialect area, and originally only spoke the local dialect of Anhui and did not understand the official dialect, but at the age of sixteen or seventeen, he could write a fluent vernacular text. Why? His secret is to read Water Margin. For him, the vernacular is a written language with no direct basis for speaking. Writing spoken language in the vernacular refers to the iconic pointing gestures, vocal tones and word order syntax that have been created by the tradition for a long time, rather than a copy of the spoken language he himself uses. If such a text is somewhat "colloquial", it is the result of "translation", and the writing process is the translation process: establishing a temporary matching relationship between the local dialect and the text of the sixteenth-century Water Margin, or imagining the tone of the dialogue of the characters of the Water Margin with the help of dialect analogies, and frequently switching between their vocabulary, word order and syntax. And this matching relationship, even if established, cannot be implemented at the level of speech. To recite, Hu Shi also had to use dialects, that is, to translate the written text into his customary vernacular. In many regions, especially in the south, it is common to recite in the vernacular, as well as in vernacular. It is just that this process of "translation" has not resorted to words, and has always lacked serious investigation. From this point of view, Wen Yanwen is not a "dead text" that cannot be read or understood, and the "vernacular script" in Hu Shi's mind does not live anywhere, at most it is only a spoken language conceived by dialect as a medium, but what is important is that it is an imaginary spoken language that transcends dialect differences, and just as importantly, it produces effects by writing.
In contrast, Fu Si Nian was serious about putting the idea of vernacular into practice. Of course, the vernacular in his head is still an upside-down concept, but he at least advocates starting from the colloquial language: you must first learn to speak standard Chinese before it is possible to write Chinese words. Hu Shi objected, arguing that this idea was unrealistic: "Most Chinese literati do not pay attention to speech, and there are many writers born outside the official language area, and they are not as fluent in official language as they are in writing vernacular." So this proposition is easy to say and very difficult to implement. According to this logic, if you can already write fluent vernacular texts, why should you learn official language? Not only does the official language not constitute the necessary premise of vernacular writing, but it becomes an additional burden. There is no need to learn mandarin, and there is another reason: "Chinese cannot be made by a few linguistic specialists alone; nor can it be made by a few Chinese textbooks and a few Chinese dictionaries." If you want to make Chinese, you must first create Chinese literature. Again, citing European precedents, he said: "I have studied the history of the Chinese of European countries over the past few years, and there is no Chinese which is not caused by this. (Ibid.) Yes, the establishment of the Italian language is inseparable from the works of Dante, Boccaccio and others, and the modern printing technology in the West has also played a role in standardizing the writing of characters, but Hu Shi does not mention the importance of Latin in shaping the Italian language, and the formation and development of the vernacular language is even more inseparable from the literary language belonging to the same Chinese character writing system. Leaving that aside, what Hu Shi really wanted to say was that speaking didn't matter.
Indeed, Hu Shi did not take the voice seriously at all. The vernacular, as a written language, does not correspond to the spoken word, nor can it be compared with what he calls the Vernacular of Europe. Hu Shi's vernacular conception remains centered on writing, and this is part of the imperial legacy that he fiercely criticizes—whether he himself acknowledges it or not, and whether he consciously or not, the imperial legacy is successfully transformed into an important resource for the construction of the nation-state.
The May Fourth Vernacular Controversy has a wide range of historical, political and cultural significance, and is by no means limited to the field of language and writing. From the perspective of historical sources, it is inseparable from the main body construction and national identity of individuals and ethnic groups in modern Europe. Therefore, when we look back at the May Fourth Vernacular Movement today, it is inevitable that the different paths of China and the West from traditional empires to modern nation-states, as well as many important issues that accompany them. Some of these issues are still facing us today, even more so than a century ago.
▍ From Empire to Nation-State: China's Path and Historical Experience
In fact, as the leader of the May Fourth Vernacular Movement, Hu Shi did not delve into the profound significance of vernacular in modern Europe, that is, to build a single modern nation-state with internal identity from the perspective of regional, ethnic, and religious cultures along with the collapse of the empire. Crucially, phonocentrism provides the theoretical basis for this new identity. That is to say, the nation-state of modern Europe reconstructed the written language on the basis of the spoken language, and the so-called spoken language, which is the local colloquialism used by the local people, later developed into the language of the nation-state. The latter not only achieves a high degree of consistency with the homogeneous ethnic, religious, cultural, and political communities within the nation-state, but also participates in expressing and shaping the homogeneity within this community.
We know that Hu Shi and his colleagues did not create a new form of writing based on the colloquial language of the time, but only destroyed the symbiotic coexistence of two types of Chinese character writing within the empire, replacing the vernacular with vernacular. That is, under the pretext of vernacular's legitimacy and legitimacy, within the empire, the historical transformation into a nation-state is completed, rather than dividing a vast empire into different nation-states on the basis of geography, race, and language.
Therefore, my original intention was not to make a reversal article on the topic of the May Fourth vernacular, but to use this as an example to observe and understand the different ways of modern China from empire to nation-state, and also to try to grasp the influence of the legacy of the Chinese Empire on modern China. Needless to say, the Chinese-style nation-state is one of the few examples: it preserves the coexistence of cross-regional, multi-ethnic, and different religions, cultures, and languages (including Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, Hui, and Uyghur scripts other than Chinese characters). In terms of Chinese character writing alone, it was precisely the "structural separation of words and texts" that played a considerable role in maintaining the diversity of the empire's internal ecology, including the diversity of dialects and spoken languages, and in avoiding or reducing regional, ethnic, religious, and cultural conflicts. In general, even a relatively unified Chinese character writing system does not necessarily suppress and destroy regional language differences, but because it provides the possibility of internal writing and communication within the empire, it plays a role in protecting regional languages, at least within the scope of the spoken language to ensure the autonomous space for free use of dialect communication within different regions, without unifying the spoken language with a standard writing system. In this sense, the empire's written integration and spoken linguistic diversity reached a mutually reinforcing relationship, not a relationship of deprivation and deprivation, repression and repression. Unfortunately, such a vision of observation is often obscured or distorted by the narrative logic of the rising nation-state.
In contrast, the modern European style of "consistency of words", which, in conjunction with the differentiation of ethnic, religious and cultural identities, and the birth of the modern nation-state, re-painted the picture of the world, while also causing astonishing conflicts, violence and bloodshed throughout history. Taking language and writing as the starting point of observation, it is not difficult to see that this process has caused, on the one hand, a violent rupture in history and culture, and this mode of fractured development is a common pattern in Western history; on the other hand, the increase in the variety and increasing pluralism of written languages, almost without exception, are at the expense of the diversity of spoken languages. Local spoken languages (including smaller languages and dialects) that do not enter writing and printing are repressed and ostracized, and lead directly to conflicts of nation-state identities or to crises of political representation within the Community. Habermas once used Germany as an example to analyze how it is difficult to reach a compromise between the cultural boundaries of the linguistic community and the political boundaries of the legal community when Germany solves the problem of national unity. On the basis of the latter, it is necessary to include some non-German-speaking minorities in the territory of the nation-state and others to the exclusion of German-speaking minorities. Moreover, the various political and cultural measures taken around the homogeneity of the linguistic community inevitably undermine the idea of the people/ethnic group as an organism, which is one of the prerequisites for the establishment of the nation-state (On the People/Ethnic Groups). The situation in France was even more complicated, and in addition to the means of administrative assimilation, the French Revolution also played an important role in the creation of a political community of the "French people". It can be seen that the confirmation and establishment of the language and writing of the nation-state itself has never been a "natural" process of reaching consensus, but a manipulation and operation full of power and violence.
For the model of the Chinese Empire, of course, it is also necessary to make a historical analysis. The Qing Empire was different from its predecessors in many ways, but like all empires, it was inseparable from power and violence from beginning to end, but the field and way of operation were obviously different from those of modern nation-states. The in-depth discussion of these issues will inevitably involve issues related to the legitimacy of the empire, the administrative system, the information exchange system, the central and local, the center and the margins, dialects and regional cultures, and the concept of language and writing. To take just one example, looking at the qing empire's efforts to unify the phonetics and their ultimate failures, it is also another witness to the historical division between traditional empires and modern nation-states.
In 1728, the Yongzheng Emperor issued an edict instructing the governors of Fujian and Guangdong provinces and the instructors of Fuzhou County to instruct local students to learn the official dialect, and then ordered that "wherever the township pronunciation is read", the official language instructor must be extended, and the students who do not speak official language, as well as the students and the students and the students and gongsheng who do not speak officially, are not allowed to take the examination. Officialdom has become a prerequisite for entering the imperial examination. The following year, the Zhengyin Library was set up, which was limited to eight years and must be effective. The cause of this incident, according to Yongzheng, was that officials from Fujian and Guangdong provinces still used the local dialect during the period of Chen's resume, which could not be understood. Yongzheng's intentions are clear: he wants to take Fujian and Guangdong as a pilot, and once the ban on "teaching in dialect sounds" is successful, he will universally implement this policy in the provinces that use fangyin to read and speak. But to his disappointment, Zhengyin's move had little effect. The twelve "Zhengyin" instructors sent from Zhejiang and Jiangxi could not speak pure pronunciation, and the local disciples did not remove the township pronunciation, and they learned an official dialect with Wu and Gan accents. Not only that, the instructors are not familiar with the local dialect, "the master and apprentice questions and answers, each other's grid, is really not beneficial to the right tone." Yongzheng had to relax the deadline repeatedly, while the local officials' reports remained as lackluster as ever. In the second year of the Qianlong Emperor's reign, he basically abandoned his father's incomprehensible practices.
In the case of Zhengyin, Yongzheng was an exception among the emperors of the Qing Dynasty. However, the problems he dealt with were not limited to speech, but also out of concern for the governance of officials and local governance. Yongzheng's fear was not unreasonable: if he could not even understand the words in front of the emperor, once he went to other provinces, when he "read out the precepts and judged the lawsuits", how could he "make the small people know and understand together"? And sympathize with the people's feelings, upload and issue, where to talk about it? There was even more that reassured him: "The language of the officials and the people at all levels is not clear, and it will cause the officials to pass on the story from the middle, so they add false loans, and there are many drawbacks, and there are many people who make mistakes in the matter." He was worried that the local officials sent by the government would be hollowed out by the local forces because of the language barrier, causing Xu officials to profit from them. Similar concerns were more or less evident when the Qing court carried out land reform and return to the Miao areas. But in any case, Yongzheng's reform initiatives ultimately failed.
▍ Spoken language, writing and identity awareness and national identity
The question that needs to be answered here is not only why Yongzheng failed, but why did other emperors not do this like him? Why did his orthoponic practice become an exception? The more fundamental question is: What is the meaning of spoken language in the political and cultural traditions of the Qing Empire and even dynasties? What does it mean to be local, which is closely related to spoken language? Why was it that uniform pronunciation and consistency of speech were not a top priority for imperial rule, or even on the agenda?
Of course, there are many reasons why we cannot discuss them here. It was first necessary to see whether there was an urgent need for uniform accents and consistency within the Empire, and whether the bureaucracy still had the capacity and resources to overcome the obstacles to verbal communication. In addition, the implementation of uniform pronunciation has a question of feasibility and effectiveness. In the absence of auxiliary technical tools, it is indeed quite difficult to implement. But Yongzheng, with his Manchu origin, can speak a good official dialect, but the test sons and officials of Fujian and Guangdong provinces, which are mainly Han Chinese, can't learn it? He was incomprehensible and had lost patience. He did not understand, or at least forgot, that the passive resistance of readers in Fujian and Guangdong had deeper historical roots: Minnan dialect and Cantonese had somewhat retained the characteristics of medieval phonology, which was closer to the orthodox poetic rhyme system and formed the basis for the use of poetry rhyme in the imperial examination. And the official voice promoted by the Qing court, based on the later northern dialect, how can it be compared in terms of reputation and status? Not only that, the Qing court did not make much achievement in standardizing the pronunciation of characters, and the official rhyme system of the Qing Dynasty, represented by the "Explanation of Sound Rhymes" compiled by Yongzheng in the fourth year of Yongzheng (1726), was borrowed from Hirata Masaji, but it was just a patchwork "fictitious framework".
In terms of the concept of language, in pre-twentieth-century China, the spoken dialect (that is, the language as opposed to the written word) had nothing to do with identity in the modern Western sense. The importance of dialect speaking in modern Western theory is directly reflected in the phonetic center speaking. In the modern history of Europe, speech centrism has interacted with romanticism and the rise of the modern nation-state. Nineteenth-century Romantics and nationalists often claimed that it was in the native tongues that they discovered the soul and spirit of their own race. On the one hand, Western linguists have constructed the evolutionary history of the linear unfolding of the world's languages and scripts on the basis of this, from pictorial characters, schematic symbols, ideographic scripts, and finally to pinyin characters, and at the same time, they have been interpreted as a bottom-up hierarchical order with intrinsic significance, thus achieving the unity of history and logic; on the other hand, in modern Europe, accompanied by phonetic centrism, it is about the individual, A set of ethnic and local discourses, including the idea of "mother tongue", the idea that "language creates peoples/nations", what Weber calls "ethnic fiction" in European history, including the purity of ethnic origin and descent, and the theory of people/ethnic subjects as historical subjects– they are interrelated and contribute to a new identity of individual/ethnic subjectivity and nationalism.
The chinese movement of consistency of speech in the late Qing Dynasty can be traced directly back to the Meiji Restoration in Japan. But the reformers of the late Qing Dynasty did not seem to realize that the Japanese speech and language uniform movement, aimed at abolishing Chinese characters, was theoretically based on Western phonetic centralism: by adopting pinyin characters with inherent qualities such as economy, accuracy, and equality, they finally found the true voice and missing subjectivity of the Yamato nation, which had long been obscured by Chinese characters, although Chinese characters never imposed a fixed phonetic system.
Fifty-tone chart in Japanese
Returning to the historical context of the late Qing Dynasty, we basically cannot find the local version or corresponding theory of the phonetic center theory, and the structural logic of the Qing Empire is also different from the structural logic of the modern nation-state, and its cohesion comes from writing, not spoken language, so it is rare to see the practice of essentializing speech. Unlike the theory of phonological superiority, in the theoretical discourse of chinese dynasties, the debate about whether writing and writing can reach the meaning often constitutes a question of language and sound at the same time, rather than affirming the spoken language by doubting writing (Zhou Yi Zhi Zhi Shang: "Zi Yue: 'The book is not full of words, the words are not complete'). "In the Wei and Jin dynasties, around the debate of words and meanings, there was a theory of unsatisfactory).) On the contrary, by sharing the same writing system, the users of Chinese characters gain membership in this cultural community, entering history and literature not only through reading, but also through the practice of writing, and in a secular culture, finding the "sacred" path to "immortality". It is a community of "civilizations" made up of characters, not sounds. Precisely because Chinese characters are not the carrier or medium of sound, their rich sense of meaning cannot be replaced by pinyin letters.
Due to the vast size of the empire, the spoken language was bound to be inseparable from the region. The issue of dialects is quite complex, and even the definition itself is worth scrutinizing. Linguists often think of dialects as local sounds that can be understood by each other, but this is not quite appropriate for the Chinese situation. Therefore, they suggest the use of topolects, or even languages, to describe these regional language families, not only for differences in pronunciation, but also for differences in vocabulary grammar and so on. But what is more troublesome is that even within the same local phonology, it is sometimes impossible to communicate effectively. Such a diverse local phonology, and the regional dividing lines of ethnicity, religion, and culture in the modern sense, do not always coincide with each other, but intertwine with each other, forming a pattern of you have me and I have you. Similarly, administrative divisions and linguistic areas are not necessarily consistent. But in any case, the imperial system provided a more inclusive framework for the diversity and complexity of internal languages that the modern European nation-state could not match. And precisely because the various relations and boundaries within the empire are intertwined and superimposed, it is not easy to build a more internal and homogeneous political community based on any one of these factors.
Returning to Yongzheng's above-mentioned concerns about local governance, we can't help but ask: Behind his repeated orders, has he revealed new hidden dangers and challenges to imperial governance? Will locality, marked by the dialect, form a centrifugal force within the empire, and even develop the possibility of local autonomy from local identity?
The internal and external difficulties of the late Qing Dynasty did lead to the subsequent division of warlords, which, according to Kong Feili's research, was directly related to the militarization of the gentry and their local organizations during the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. But in most regions, the mere construction of local consciousness in colloquial language does not seem to be enough to generate demands for identity politics. Although the local sound is inseparable from the individual's sense of belonging, it can also be used to express the pride of the hometown and the geographical relationship in a broad sense, but its locality is mainly reflected in the ecological relationship, not the biological meaning. A person speaks the local dialect only because he was born in a certain place, and his relationship with the dialect is accidental and external. Therefore, when speaking in dialect, people usually do not resort to the personification of "mother tongue", or regard the dialect as the basis for confirming their identity, and certainly do not spontaneously produce modern individual subjectivity, racial consciousness and national state concepts based on speech. In this sense, the May Fourth Vernacular Movement, no matter how fiercely anti-traditional, still began with the historical conditions and cultural traditions of the empire.
▍ Vernacular movement and Chinese character pinyinization
Speaking of the vernacular movement, it is inevitable to think of another major ongoing event in the reform of modern languages and writings, that is, the pinyinization movement to abolish Chinese characters. Some people may think that their goals are different, or even different, at least the vernacular is still written in Chinese characters. How should the relationship between these two movements be understood?
Like many radical and not necessarily radical intellectuals of the time, Hu Shi was also enthusiastically in favor of the pinyinization of Chinese characters. In fact, when he advocated dialect literature as vernacular literature, he strongly admired Xu Zhimo's use of Chinese characters to spell Wu. Although Xu Zhimo's Wu poetry retains the characters of Chinese characters (script), does using Chinese characters as sound characters not equivalent to abolishing the Chinese character writing system? How is this different from spoken dialects spelled in the Roman alphabet? But it's the same thing.
How exactly does Hu Shi understand the relationship between vernacular (or Chinese literature) and pinyin characters? In 1936, Hu Shi wrote in a letter to Zhou Zuoren about the difficulties of pinyinization of Chinese characters:
Our territory is large and there are many dialects, although literate people everywhere can understand "Dream of the Red Chamber" and "Biography of Children's Heroes" written in Beijing dialect, but the pronunciation of people in different places is different. It all depends on the Kanji symbol to make a public symbol. For example, the phrase "I've been here for three days" ,...... Written in Chinese characters, the whole country can pass; if spelled alphabetic text, this sentence can become dozens of different characters, and they cannot communicate with each other. Of course, we hope that in the future, everyone in the whole country can recognize a common phonetic alphabet. But at a time when our country's territory is being divided and invaded, I very much agree with your proposition that we must make full use of the "three things of Chinese, Chinese characters, and Chinese" as tools to connect the feelings and thoughts of the entire nation. These three pieces are actually just one thing that is "written in Chinese characters Chinese Chinese text". This is indeed the only tool for today's Chinese nation to contact the whole country, north, south, east, west, and in the sea and abroad.
Hu Shi's thoughts have changed all his life, and at this moment, it is time to secretly rejoice, but he can't help but be a little afraid. At a critical juncture of the Japanese invasion, Zhou Zuoren reminded everyone that Chinese characters can play a role in maintaining national consciousness, and this has become an urgent problem. Although the "Chinese nation" (the Chinese nation) itself is a synthetic community that cannot be confused with the monolithic peoples that form the basis of modern European states, the consequences of the pinyinization movement that abolished Chinese characters are not without precedent, that is, like Vietnam and Korea, they have lost the ability to directly read their own history, and correspondingly created cultural fractures that are difficult to heal, and it is no longer possible to define themselves and establish their own subjectivity through the historical and cultural heritage of the written language. In the case that the voice has not yet reached a high degree of consensus nationwide, the result of promoting pinyin is bound to lead to the barrier of text communication and the division within the country. Therefore, whether in time or space, a unified nation-state will be difficult to maintain. Hu Shi seemed to finally understand something, but he didn't quite understand. Although he believed that the direction of the next twenty years was to promote vernacular language, he always hoped that "phonetic alphabet characters can replace the Square Chinese characters as educational and literary tools for 40 million people in China in the not very distant future."
According to the evolution model of the modern nation-state in Europe, the result of the so-called pinyinization or Latinization of Chinese character writing is the same as that of vernacularization, which is to split into a number of different and unitary nation-states from the empire, that is, according to the logic of the phonetic center of the pinyin script, to construct a new sense of individual subjectivity and national identity, although it was not until the nineteenth century that language really became an important driving force for the formation and development of modern nation-states in Europe.
It should be noted that in the European pinyin script, the so-called vernacularization is the spelling of local spoken language, but when it is introduced into the Chinese writing of ideographs, it has diverged into two movements: vernacular and pinyin. Therefore, according to Hu Shi's understanding, the vernacular written in Chinese characters and the "phonetic alphabet" that abolished Chinese characters do not contradict each other, but have inherent consistency. They constitute two stages in the evolution of the same script: the vernacular is a necessary transitional stage for the ultimate purpose of the pinyin script.
It is worth noting that Hu Shi set a necessary premise for the development of vernacular to pinyin characters: first establish a standard Chinese, and use this as a phonetic basis to develop pinyin characters, you can avoid the fragmentation and fragmentation of the Balkanization caused by pinyin characters. But doing so clearly departs from the direction of modern Europe's literal spelling of local spoken language. In this regard, Hu Shi's opinion was closer to the pro-Romanization faction at the time, hoping to use the support of the government to promote a nationwide reform of the script Chinese with roman alphabet spelling standards. This is the inverted textual consistency described above, which unifies pronunciation by writing; contrary to the proponents of Latinization who devoted themselves to spelling out the spoken dialects of the localities, the orientation is exactly the opposite. But the prospect of Latinization, Hu Shi is not unaware, that is, the situation written in his letter: the same sentence, if spelled according to the dialect of various places, becomes dozens of scripts, and they cannot communicate with each other. And this is the inevitable product of the colloquialization and localization of modern European writing.
So why do you have to end up scrapping Chinese characters? Most of these claims come from practical theory and instrumental considerations, thinking that Chinese characters are difficult to read and write, and cannot be popularized. Thus, from top-down enlightenment, the opening of people's wisdom, the facilitation of typing and printing and the mobilization of the state, the improvement of the exchange of information from top to bottom, all the way to the modernization of state management, it seems that everything depends on the pinyinization of Chinese characters— a paradoxical nation-state discourse unfolding under the premise of modernization: only thorough reform, including writing reform, can ensure that China stands on its own feet among the nations of the world in the twentieth century, although this reform also negates the historical and cultural tradition of why China became a nation-state.
In addition, the idea of abolishing the pinyinization of Chinese characters has a more universal appeal, especially in the demands of egalitarianism, which goes further than the vernacular. In the eyes of left-wing intellectuals, the toiling masses were deprived of their right to education and thus reduced to the point of domination, and at least part of the account was to be counted on the "difficult" Chinese characters. For the more radical anti-traditionalists, abolishing Chinese characters would both save the masses from being poisoned by the dross of tradition once and for all, and provide a convenient tool for their self-expression, thus spelling the true voices of the lower classes into readable words. At least that's what the Latins say, and this seems to be connected to phonetic centrism, except that what accompanies speech-centrism here is not so much a nation-state identity as the construction of class consciousness. But whether it is Latinization or Romanization, the pinyin characters that abolish Chinese characters are good to say, but once they are implemented in literary creation, they are lackluster. The so-called self-expression, but just talk, is difficult to sustain.
It may also be argued that Hu Shi simply borrowed vernacular, a modern Western discourse with legitimacy, to deal with the historical situation of the early twentieth century. His real idea was not necessarily to achieve the colloquialization or localization of writing in the modern European sense, of course, not to divide the empire into different single nation-states, but to realize the transformation from empire to nation-state in the spatial framework of the Qing Empire.
Indeed, Hu Shi's claim to establish Chinese through vernacular literature, no matter how radical it sounds, is still premised on maintaining the empire's territory. As mentioned earlier, the vernacular language he strongly advocated, although it was called the style of language and the "living script", was actually derived from the existing writing system and followed the imperial tradition of writing centralism, so it was not directly related to the spoken language. Even in favor of eventually abolishing Chinese characters, Hu Shi insisted on implementing pinyinization based on a phonetic system that matched the standard Chinese writing. However, his anti-traditional posture is not in vain. He embraced the tradition of writing in the vernacular as the mainstream of literary history, and this was at the expense of the longer and larger tradition of writing. The shift to pinyin has embarked on a road of no return: abandoning the cultural tradition of using Chinese characters as a carrier, and at the same time putting the problem of pronunciation on the table. In this way, the spatial framework inherited from the traditional empire becomes an empty shell that has been hollowed out of the historical and cultural medium and the internal continuity, and thus loses the reason for its continued existence. It cannot provide a defense of its own legitimacy.
In the historical context of China in the first half of the twentieth century, the nation-state discourse that accompanied the local colloquialism of modern Europe, once implemented into the vernacular movement and the Chinese character pinyin movement, was consciously or unconsciously, or discounted, or yin and yang, and abandoned halfway, without reaching its logical end. Judging from the results, it can be said that it is crooked and straight, and it is somewhat lucky. However, in an era of increasingly divisive conflict between individual, national, ethnic, religious, and cultural identities, and at a time when global nation-nationalism is on the rise, how can it not be universal to look back at this "special" path from empire to nation-state? Importantly, it realizes a historical possibility that has been rejected by the modern European experience, and it also implies a normative model with intrinsic value to ponder. Therefore, the question that needs to be asked is precisely this: What is the contribution and significance of China's experience in the past century to our observation and understanding of world history and current reality? One might argue that even today's China is still not a "typical" modern nation-state in the European sense, and that its transition from empire to nation-state has not yet been completed, and the accompanying language and writing revolution has yet to unfold. But looking at the modern nation-states in the West, to this day, are still struggling on the road to rebuilding the European Community, and they can't help but feel that they have turned back the clock and wonder: what is typical and what is the exception, whose historical experience can rise to the level of abstraction into a universal model, and whose historical course has become a "special" path? After all, who took a historical detour or fork in the road? We should perhaps not make alternative assumptions about the past, but who can say that only the European-style modern nation-state is the only way to go, or, as we used to say, the so-called "only way of history"?
This article was originally divided into two parts, the first and second parts, published in Reading, No. 11 and 12, 2016, originally titled "Separation of Language and Literature and the Historical Misunderstanding of the Modern Nation-State - "Vernacular Literature" and Its Significance". The article only represents the author's own views, welcome to share, media reprint please contact the copyright owner.